This invention is a treatment for baldness. While numerous treatments for baldness have been attempted, each has associated problems that this method will resolve.
Initial attempts to treat baldness involved hairpieces. A hairpiece consists of a base mesh to which individual hairs are attached. A sufficient quantity of hair must be attached to the mesh to completely conceal the mesh itself. This frequently results in an unnatural fullness in the hairpiece. This is especially true for people middle-aged and older who would normally have naturally thinning hair. The primary problem with this treatment involves the attachment of the hairpiece to the scalp. When a large area of the scalp must be covered, the weight of the hairpiece exacerbates the attachment problem. The attachment process usually involves adhesives, such as double sided tape, which tend to loosen when mixed with oils and perspiration normally present on the scalp. In addition, most of these adhesives are arduous to remove during cleaning. To insure proper bonding with new adhesive, old adhesive must be thoroughly removed prior to each cleaning of the hairpiece. Depending upon the degree and type of activity, this cleaning process may be required several times each week.
Several attempts to remedy the attachment problem involved tying the hairpiece to growing hair on the head. Unfortunately, as the growing hair grows, the replacement hair becomes loose and must be periodically tightened. Because hair grows at an approximate rate of one-half inch per month, the tightening is normally required at frequent intervals.
Other attachment procedures utilized sutures implanted in the scalp with the replacement hair attached to the portion of the sutures exposed above the scalp. This relatively permanent attachment made cleaning difficult, especially in the area of the sutures, resulting in chronic infection. One attempt to resolve this problem utilized wefts, a single filament with hair attached, tied to rows of sutures, giving greater access to clean the suture area. However, high stress due to the relatively large number of hairs per suture caused many of the sutures to cut through the scalp, causing infection and requiring frequent replacement.
Other attempts to treat baldness involved the implantation of fibers directly into the scalp. Every attempt involved insertion of the hair into the scalp by a puncture performed with a needle-like tool. Initial attempts used single strands of hair. Subsequent attempts used multiple strands or single strands that were weaved in and out of the scalp and subsequently cut to create the appearance of single hairs emerging from the scalp. In each of these methods, the scalp relied upon to retain the hair. In most cases, normal grooming caused the hair to pull from the hole in the scalp. Numerous methods attempted to solved this problem through the use of various knots and loops, however, elasticity of the scalp resulted in failure of each of these attempts.
A surgical method that has met with limited success involves the use of transplanted hair. Small plugs of scalp containing hair follicles are removed from the back of the head and transplanted to the balding areas of the head. This procedure does not add any hair to the scalp, but simply relocates the existing hair. Therefore, it is limited to those with relatively minor hair loss. Large areas of the scalp cannot be covered sufficiently with this method, especially if the donor site is limited.